This study newly investigates whether the functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts listeners’ learning and use of that cue in second-language speech segmentation. It compares English and Dutch listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals word-initial boundaries in English and Dutch, but has a weaker functional weight in English than Dutch because it is more strongly correlated with vowel quality in English than Dutch. English- and Dutch-speaking learners of French matched in French proficiency and experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in French where they monitored words ending with/out an F0 rise (replication of Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). Dutch listeners made earlier/greater use of the F0 rise than English listeners, and in one condition they made greater use of F0 rise than French listeners, extending the cue-weighting theory to speech segmentation.

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672891700030X

*This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1423905 awarded to the first author (AT). Support for this research also comes from a Language Learning small research grant awarded to the first author, and a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded to the second author (MB). We are grateful to Dr. Amandine Michelas for help with the French listeners’ data collection.

Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672891700030X

*This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1423905 awarded to the first author (AT). Support for this research also comes from a Language Learning small research grant awarded to the first author, and a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded to the second author (MB). We are grateful to Dr. Amandine Michelas for help with the French listeners’ data collection.